Ruling — Earth — RuleSage

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You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Earthbg-350184-en-1e

Shared Setup

1. Place the Fauna board in the center of the table within view of all players.[1]

2. For a simpler game, use the beginner side of the board, marked with an icon in the center.[1]

3. Hand out a player board to each player, ensuring all players use the same side (front) of their player board.[1]

4. Leave space next to each player board where a 4x4 tableau of cards can be created.[1]

5. Create the central supply by placing all Sprouts, Soil tokens, and Growth (Trunk, Canopy) next to the Fauna board.[1]

6. Shuffle all Earth cards and place them in a facedown draw pile (or piles) within reach of all players.[1]

7. Leave space for a discard pile next to the draw pile(s).[1]

8. Shuffle the Fauna cards and place one with a random side faceup on each of the 4 spaces on the Fauna board; return remaining Fauna cards to the box.[1]

9. Shuffle the Ecosystem cards and place one with a random side faceup on each of the 2 spaces on the Fauna board.[1]

Individual Setup

10. Shuffle the Island cards and deal one to each player; return the remainder to the box.[2]

11. Repeat the shuffling and dealing process with the Climate cards.[2]

12. For advanced players, deal out 2 Island, 2 Climate, and 2 Ecosystem cards for them to choose from.[2]

13. Deal 1 Ecosystem card to each player (note: in a beginner game, Ecosystem cards are not used and can remain in the box).[1]

14. Once all players are ready, randomly choose a starting player and give them the First-player token and the Active-player token.[2]

15. Each player must select one side of their Island, Climate, and Ecosystem cards to use by placing it faceup on its corresponding space on their player board.[2]

16. Each player takes 5 Leaf tokens of one colour, placing 4 on the central leaf spaces on their player board and keeping the 5th to the side to track their action selection.[2]

17. Each player draws a number of Earth cards as indicated on their ISLAND card.[2]

18. After reviewing these cards, players simultaneously choose which ones to keep in their hand and which to Compost; they must Compost from their hand the number of cards indicated on their ISLAND card by placing them facedown on the Compost space on their player board.[2]

19. Each player takes the number of Soil indicated on their ISLAND card and places them on the central area of their player board to create their personal reserve.[2]

Team Mode Setup (2 vs 2)

1. Set up the game as you would for a regular game, with teammates sitting beside each other.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook · p.2 · COMPONENTS · SHARED SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook · p.2 · INDIVIDUAL SETUP · GETTING STARTED

[3] RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook · p.9

Now you know — make it count.

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 199 ms · ask 4674 ms · total 4877 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4877 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "Shuffle the Island cards , and then deal one to each player. The remainder will not be used for this game and should be returned to the box. Repeat with the Climate cards . For advanced players, deal out 2 Island, 2 Climate, and 2 Ecosystem cards for them to choose from. Once all players are ready ,", "headingPath": "INDIVIDUAL SETUP · GETTING STARTED", "sharpsignalDocId": 388}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.046642, "snippet": "Fauna board Player board Sprouts Soil tokens Trunks (Growth) Canopies (Growth) Earth cards (Flora, Terrain & Event) Fauna cards Ecosystem cards Island cards 6 cards with a darker back and a icon are used only in the solo game. For information on solo play, see page 15. Earth_Cards.indd 3 2023-04-19 ", "headingPath": "COMPONENTS · SHARED SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 388}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "On your turn, choose any 1 of the 4 action spaces shown at the top of your player board. To mark your choice, place the active-player token above the corresponding action. All other players place their 5th Leaf token on the bottom of the same action space as a way to track their action options. Play", "headingPath": "TURN/ACTION OVERVIEW · Planting (see page 6): · ACTIVATING ABILITIES · Composting (see page 7):", "sharpsignalDocId": 388}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Cards on a player board may be activated before or after the tableau, but the tableau must be activated in order—from left column to right, then top row to bottom If the Earth deck runs out, shuffle the discard pile to create a new draw pile. Do not shuffle in any player’s Compost—these cards are wo", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 388}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Abilities are activated after taking their matching action ( GREEN activates GREEN , RED activates RED ... etc.). Multicoloured abilities (which consist of BLUE , YELLOW , and RED abilities) are also triggered when the BLUE , YELLOW , or RED action is chosen: these multicoloured abilities are activa", "headingPath": "ACTIVATING ABILITIES - CONTINUED · PLANTING: PLACE, DRAW, AND DRAFT CARDS · At the end of the game, you will score the base VP value of each card you have planted. · These 3 cards are not placed in their personal Compost.", "sharpsignalDocId": 388}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030415, "snippet": "16 TEAM MODE (2 VS 2) The team mode follows the same rules as the regular game, but it allows players to work together against another team. Set up the game as you would for a regular game, with teammates sitting beside each other A . Any time a player earns resources (cards, Compost, Soil, Sprouts,", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 388}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "10 Take a look at the scoring reminder and the iconography index on the bottom of your player board and you'll be 95% ready to play. The rest of the rules represent the other 5%; they include clarifications, examples and a Solo mode, and cover exceptions and specific details. 10 10 Are you looking f", "headingPath": "FROM THIS POINT, YOU ARE 90% READY TO PLAY. 10", "sharpsignalDocId": 388}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030282, "snippet": "14 15 SOLO MODE The solo mode follows most of the same rules as the standard game, with the most obvious exception being that you are competing against an Artificial Intelligence (AI) named Gaia. Begin by setting up the game as you would for a regular (or advanced) game, but set your player board on", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 388}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "COMPONENTS · SHARED SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 388}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "INDIVIDUAL SETUP · GETTING STARTED", "sharpsignalDocId": 388}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 388}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 388 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 388 boosted
answered-before recall: this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
answer fence: passed — letter density 0.90865 of 2069 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Oct 24, 2026 16:22 UTC

retrieval — what the passage search returned

what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.

per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

fused rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)	INDIVIDUAL SETUP · GETTING STARTED	p.2	0.048412 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)	COMPONENTS · SHARED SETUP	p.2	0.046642 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#3	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)	TURN/ACTION OVERVIEW · Planting (see page 6): · ACTIVATING ABILITIES · Composting (see page 7):	p.3	0.032258 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)		p.4	0.031746 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#5	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)	ACTIVATING ABILITIES - CONTINUED · PLANTING: PLACE, DRAW, AND DRAFT CARDS · At the end of the game, you will score the base VP value of each card you have planted. · These 3 cards are not placed in their personal Compost.	p.4	0.03125 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)		p.9	0.030415 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)	FROM THIS POINT, YOU ARE 90% READY TO PLAY. 10	p.5	0.030303 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)		p.8	0.030282 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300

what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it

what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.

candidate pool: the answering read scored 58 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.

floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — not armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.

arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.

read at	document	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)	INDIVIDUAL SETUP · GETTING STARTED	p.2	#1	0.048412 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)		p.9	#6	0.030415 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)		p.4	#4	0.031746 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)	TURN/ACTION OVERVIEW · Planting (see page 6): · ACTIVATING ABILITIES · Composting (see page 7):	p.3	#3	0.032258 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)	Watering (see page 7): · Growing (see page 8):	p.3	#12	0.014085 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)		p.1	#29	0.011236 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)		p.8	#8	0.030282 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)	COMPONENTS · SHARED SETUP	p.2	#2	0.046642 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)	COMPONENTS · SHARED SETUP	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)	INDIVIDUAL SETUP · GETTING STARTED	p.2	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 388)		p.9	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 199 ms · first delta 1683 ms · total 4877 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 0 ms · retrieval 199 ms · ask 4674 ms · gateway work 4877 ms · total 4877 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3972
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 625
tok/sec: 200.9 tok/sec — 625 output tokens in 3.111 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 37s ago)
gateway schema (read from the running child): schema head 0042_definer_search_path (live revision not readable by this principal)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 5h, checked 0s ago)
answerer node (the seat proxy's own header — this probe, not this ask): node1
stream path: streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
watchdog: first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
num_ctx · think posture: both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.

disposition

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered): answered — no abstain rationale applies

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

decision: NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
pattern that matched: SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 316), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one

Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.